Lists of books we reread and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves.
Interpretation
The books we choose to revisit or abandon reveal our true selves more than those books' inherent value.
This quote suggests that our reading habits reflect our personalities and preferences more than the actual merits of the books we encounter. Rereading certain books indicates a personal connection or understanding, while books we cannot finish may symbolize mismatches with our interests, values, or emotional readiness. In essence, our literary choices tell a story about who we are, illuminating our tastes, thoughts, and life experiences.
In practice
During a book club discussion on personal growth, I shared this quote to emphasize how our reading choices can reflect our inner selves.
Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.
They were gone and I missed them but even so I was very happy. For the rest of my life no matter where on this planet earth I went and no matter how scared or confused I got, I could wait until dark and look up into the night sky and see my three friends again and my heart would swell with love of them and make me strong and clearheaded.
I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.
Motivations are too tangled and complex.
Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.
Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people.
In the century-long history of Chinese science fiction, apocalyptic themes were mostly absent. This was especially true in the period before the 1990s, when Chinese science fiction, isolated from the influence of the West, developed on its own.
It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
For me alone Don Quixote was born and I for him. His was the power of action, mine of writing.
What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim 'You know exactly what I mean!' depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.
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